Were the 2010s a blur? - (putting the "zoom" in "zoomer")

[MirrorNoir]

It really fucking bothers me how long ago the last time the world seemed to make some sense was.

I hate this fact but I'm increasingly missing the 2010s, even up to the end of the decade, 2019, at least you could go outside without worry, at least you could hold out hope that Woke wasn't here to stay, which seems increasingly unlikely now, Orange Man is gone, but what really has changed? Without hesitating a split second the left pivoted from being mad he's President to being mad he was ever allowed to be President in the first place, nothing's changed.

I used to joke about what it would take the 2020s to make me miss the 2010s, thinking there was no possible way the world could really be that terrible a place to make me miss the 2010s and yet here we already are, I miss the 2010s.

Can we just have a do over on the last decade? Where did it all go so wrong?

That kind of logic is why we are in the mess we are in. We are a culture of Malcolm McDowells, desperately wanting to get back into the Nexus and the illusionary arcadia of our youth IE the 90s and nowadays, even the 00s and pre-GG 10s, and we don't fucking care how many populated planets we have to genocide to get the Nexus to open up so we can go back to it and the phantom past we crave.

At this point, we need to start fixing things because the longer shit festers, the more likely we're going to end up waking up in a communist dystopia straigth out of 1984.

 

[AMHOLIO]

I didn't do drugs and I got out of a depression during this time, so I can recall things pretty clearly. I'm also younger, which helps.

I agree on the information age where a lot of it was a dump of info onto the doorstep of your brain. Instead of a newspaper, you got about 2 to 5 thick ass newspapers, with a lot of the pages filled with people reacting and arguing about the events as filler. It's a slog because you got a lot of shit you didn't care about between things you did, like family, friends, jobs, stuff that impacts you, etc..

Perception, recollection, and memory is a funny thing we keep learning more and more about each day. If anyone is reading this and is interested in the topic, I encourage you to look up articles and news on the subject. Science and the human mind are endlessly fascinating.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

I think there's this pattern with decades: When you're living them, they're the worst thing ever.

What if earlier decades are missed because new decades keep getting worse?

Where did it all go so wrong?

Communism?

 

[skykiii]

What if earlier decades are missed because new decades keep getting worse?

I know you're probably joking but... honestly I sometimes subscribe to that actual theory.

Right now I'm not sure. Like while the 2020s started off on the wrong foot, its too early to say they're horrible just yet.

 

[newuser131]

i read somewhere that when you are from 10 to 20 yrs old, your life feels like an eternity. when you are 20 to 30 yrs old, time feels like a long time but not like it was when you were in your teens. from 30+, time feels fast exponential every 10 years. this is mainly due to your perception of time at your age. the younger you are, then longer time feels because you haven't experienced enough life.

getting back to the 2010s. i don't think it was as craziest time in the modern era. imo, it would be the 1960s. in the 1960s, there were political assassinations (jfk), left-wing terrorist groups (weather underground, la raza, etc), hard sudden shifts in cultural norms (feminism, civil rights), threat of nuclear war with ussr (remember the usa was not the sole superpower during this time), vietnam war and the draft (2000s iraq/afganistan wars never had a draft). the only thing the 1960s had that was better than 2010s is the economy. in the 1960s economy, you could get married and live on one income and buy a house with a factory job.

our collective perception of the 2010s is primary due to social media. i hypothesis that if you take social media out of the 2010s popular zeitgeist and social media remained as a fringe idea, the 2010s would be just an extension of the 2000s. but, social media really only got popular due to the iphone and other smart phones, where you had access to the internet 24/7.

 

[Judge Dredd]

I stored them all on an external hard drive, which I still have and somehow has not had errors or anything (though just in case saying so jinxes me, I did back it up--recent events have taught me the value of redundancy). You know how sometimes you find old VHS tapes of yourself as a kid or of a block of programming your parents recorded? This hard drive was like a modern version of that. It's like a time capsule of what all I was into and thinking and on about during the 2010s.

I know that feel. I recently booted up my PS3 to watch a DVD, and on the hard drive was a bunch of youtube videos from 2013 or there abouts. I keep meaning to post it in the old internet content thread. It's strange seeing old Mr Repzeon and SFDebris videos.

One thing I regret is losing the hard drive from my first computer. Had a bunch of old videos and memes long since deleted from the internet.

I almost miss the "culture wars" stuff now. I know some of it is still going on but I mostly only hear about it on the internet.

It's where it always was. That said, I miss when it was just Anita Sarkeesian and out of touch game journos complaining that princess Peach was sexist.

from 30+, time feels fast exponential every 10 years. this is mainly due to your perception of time at your age. the younger you are, then longer time feels because you haven't experienced enough life.

There's also part of the brain that hardens and calcifies, which might contribute to it.

 

[BMO_]

No, but 20s don't feel somewhat blurry.
Sure, diseases and wars make a perfect cut between 2010s and 2020s, but culture-wise there's pretty much no difference between 2018 and 2023.

 

[saddamhussein]

anyone else remember the movie shift from the 2005-2010 or so style of portraying nyc as 'golden' with lots of emphasis on its art-deco & scyscrapers and sunset-shade light (think sam raimi spiderman) to the washed out color-drained business-tower emphasis of the early and mid 2010s

 

[Saddam Hussain Obama]

i feel like everything is dead now everything good was from that era ever wondered why zoomers are such nostalga fags because we want to live in a time thats actually good

 

[The Last Stand]

I consider the 2010s the beginning of the modern era of Internet we know of today. I remember more of Internet trends than anything else. I think 2016 would be the defining year of 2010s towards 2020 on account of Donald Trump's victory. The whole Internet, and American culture as we know today, went mental.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

It feels like it shouldn't be so far in the future yet.

 

[Brabbit Narp]

I know that feel. I recently booted up my PS3 to watch a DVD, and on the hard drive was a bunch of youtube videos from 2013 or there abouts. I keep meaning to post it in the old internet content thread. It's strange seeing old Mr Repzeon and SFDebris videos.

One thing I regret is losing the hard drive from my first computer. Had a bunch of old videos and memes long since deleted from the internet.


It's where it always was. That said, I miss when it was just Anita Sarkeesian and out of touch game journos complaining that princess Peach was sexist.


There's also part of the brain that hardens and calcifies, which might contribute to it.

Have you posted any as of yet? I've recently revisited an old account of mine from before the Google Account shit was pushed on us, and my goodness, stuff was certainly different back then. Been doing my best to archive the stuff that remains, but I only have so much drive space for the purpose.

Since I am asking, might as well contribute to this tax with a few in my playlists.

May not strictly be 2010s, but I figure the late 2000s/early 2010s count as close enough.

Regarding the thread topic, it may just be a part of growing up, but it seems the latter half of the 2010s and going into the 2020s has become more.... Dull, mundane, boring, sterile, homogenized. For me, it seemed to really start at around 2017, and it got rapidly worse in 2020 for obvious reasons.

To me, the 2010s were but a prelude of what was to come, and right now we are in the midst of a calm before the storm of shit that is bound to hit us sooner or later.

One thing I am positive of, the 2030s will make us *wish* we were back in the 2010s again, which is a horrific thought in of in itself.

 

[Neurotypical Mantis]

fuck no, they were a crawl. maybe because that was when i was a bab and everything is slow

 

[Judge Dredd]

Regarding the thread topic, it may just be a part of growing up, but it seems the latter half of the 2010s and going into the 2020s has become more.... Dull, mundane, boring, sterile, homogenized. For me, it seemed to really start at around 2017, and it got rapidly worse in 2020 for obvious reasons.

If you're talking of internet video, we can pinpoint the exact time. I forget when exactly it was, but some important person at YouTube (was it the CEO at the time?) saw some video she thought it was important everybody see it. Nobody was interested, so she asked the engineers to bump it up to everybody's recommendations. She was told that wouldn't be a good idea, but said to do it anyway. And thus began the age of the algorithm weighting results and the constant back and forth attempting to balance the system.

I don't think the stories ever mentioned what the video was, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was Kony 2012 or something like that.

Have you posted any as of yet?

I did mention it in the thread, and was pointed to an internet archive of all of SFDebris videos from 2010-2015. Mr Repzeon apparently still makes videos, but with a fraction of the viewers.

 

[Ferrari Lamborghini]

This is unlikely to fully explain the feelings of anyone who thinks this way, but something that could explain part of it at least is that when something feels "like a blur," it is usually because it lacks enough distinct things worth remembering. (You drive through an area that is one flat dirt field after another and you will likely remember it "as a blur." You drive through an area where every ten seconds there is something distinct and unique to see, and that time period will likely feel much longer.)

The 2010s are arguably when western mass media died (or at least took a particularly large leap toward the grave) and so it is possible that when you look back on the decade, there is so little culture worth remembering that it seems like a shorter amount of time:

Hollywood, which was already on a downward slope during the 2000s, decided to go all-in on making hundreds of variations on the same, single superhero movie or creatively bankrupt remakes of already established IPs, not caring about what would happen once those trends died down and the money stopped rolling in, and how it would deal with having on its hands a workforce trained too much in millennial writing and CGI and too little in life experience, observation and good writing.

The music industry, likely spurred on by all the ways the internet, file-sharing, piracy, and streaming threw everything into chaos, and following the trends that social media brought with it at the time, focused entirely on hip-hop and rappers, whose public persona and reputation and opinions became more important than the music itself. (There have been some articles lately about how the major music companies are caring less than before about new music, instead focusing on trying to out-bid each other on old, popular music. They care less about signing yet another rapper than they do seeing if they can get the publishing rights to a Beatles album.)

Popular literature has skewed ever more simplistic, juvenile, and therefore boring and unremarkable. The Young Adult genre is now completely misnamed, since the majority of people who enjoy it are over the age of 18. Western culture has become ever more infantilized and the YA genre, with its simplistic, feel-good stories and morals, appeals to the manchildren and womanchildren that are now so common in western countries. Many are too heavily influenced by Harry Potter, too, due to its huge popularity, and therefore feel very derivative and stale.

The video game industry had a similar arc as the movie industry during the 2010s, with the biggest companies focusing too much on a few, overly expensive projects that need to be as bland as possible to appeal to as many people as possible for any hope of making back the huge amount of money that was put into them, as well as relying on brand recognition. On top of that, those same companies discovered all the now popular alternative sources of revenue during the 2010s. (Team Fortress 2, one of the earliest games to use loot boxes for example, introduced them in September 2010.) The focus on trying to get gamers hooked through gambling-type mechanics meant that developers were less focused on trying to get them hooked through fun gameplay or interesting experiences instead. (The fact that this was around the time MMOs became popular, with their repetitive gameplay and game-as-a-service model, likely didn't help either.)

Western mass media used to produce something iconic basically every year. Return Of The Jedi came out in 1983. Ghostbusters came out in 1984. Back To The Future came out in 1985. What iconic things have been created lately? Leftists content with the downfall of western culture usually cope by arguing that "it takes time for things to become iconic!" That is false, since most things iconic became so basically instantly after their release. These are the sorts of cultural touchstones and shared experiences that would stick in our minds and define a time for us. We lack these today.

(As a side-note, I believe it is no coincidence that asian media is becoming bigger in the west in recent years, such as japanese games, anime, manga, vtubers, kpop, etc. The western mass media industrial complex is falling apart and people are trying to find alternatives.)

 

[Brabbit Narp]

Popular literature has skewed ever more simplistic, juvenile, and therefore boring and unremarkable. The Young Adult genre is now completely misnamed, since the majority of people who enjoy it are over the age of 18. Western culture has become ever more infantilized and the YA genre, with its simplistic, feel-good stories and morals, appeals to the manchildren and womanchildren that are now so common in western countries. Many are too heavily influenced by Harry Potter, too, due to its huge popularity, and therefore feel very derivative and stale.

I can't speak for everyone, but I find myself drifting toward such genres for the simple fact that a mass majority of the slop you find within media has become... Well, demoralizing. That isn't to say I don't dip my toes into the more complex stuff, but when you have to trudge through a sea of sludge to find something golden, I often find myself reverting to the older classics of my youth, even if they are anything but in the canon of literature.

These days, I find myself reading a lot more web original content and the like. Stuff that again, would not necessarily be deemed a classic, but is often competent in its own fashion, and is relative easier to find that dead tree originals. I have searched in vain for anything to help ease my search for decent literature that might be up my alley, as it has been far too long since I last stumbled upon anything worthy of note. But alas, literature I find does not have the best means to find the good stuff, new or old easily. All I have are the words and snippets of random previews, but that hardly tells the whole story, does it?

The best I have been able to come up with is trawling through my dad's old audiobook collection, but not everything there is to my taste.

(As a side-note, I believe it is no coincidence that asian media is becoming bigger in the west in recent years, such as japanese games, anime, manga, vtubers, kpop, etc. The western mass media industrial complex is falling apart and people are trying to find alternatives.)

When your bar is merely not insulting your audience and just telling at least something half decent without become repetitive as all hell, (At least, more so than Western media these days.) it becomes an almost comically easy explanation as to why Asian media dominates its western counterpart.

This isn't to say all of Western media is in the dumps. From what I have heard on the grapevine, French and Dutch comics are doing quite fantastically, but have yet to make a foothold in the US as far as I am aware of. It's definitely a more diverse medium as far as comic books are concerned, broaching a variety of subjects and genres. Need to try and invest looking into that more.

But even at its simplest, media such as those from Japan satisfy a simple want/need in the psyche of many a young adult. Namely, escapism. Isekai is a famous(infamous) example of this, having become the go to generic slop of the modern era, regurgitating a formula that has since become bland, but nevertheless still manages to accrue its fair share of eyeballs and profit, if for no other reason that the shit state of the people who consume it, having little future prospects to go for.

When deprived of any other alternatives to advance your future, escapism often becomes the only resort for such folks, for better or ill. I can't say it is a productive one, but it's a very understandable one seeing as for these individuals, there's little hope of remedying or addressing the systemic issues that prevent them from going up in life.

Still, I find it a shame that Isekai in question has been reduced to such a state. It reminds me of a Miyazaki quote, mistakenly attributed to him, but nonetheless rings true in that anime in its current form is a "mistake". Not to say the media itself is terrible, but it has since been reduced from what it could and *should* have been.

It isn't a surprise that Isekai and other genres have been reduced to such a state in the name of profit, but it's such a damned missed opportunity. I for one wish to see more than the bog standard of the audience surrogate of some rando overpowered young'un that is thrown into yet another game world. Again, there's so much more you can do with the simple but potent idea of transplanting a person(s), or even entire communities therein and seeing how they adapt and overcome the new challenges brought by said transplantation, jiving with the locals, and using their own unique strengths to make the most of what happened to them.

Or hell, even the reverse of that in the classic sense, seeing a typical magical like community opening up a new path to new worlds and the like.

Or if you want to do the simplest thing possible, how about throwing an old man mentoring his young grandson or nephew who may or may not be destined to be some chosen one, and making him a pivotal leader of some form given a new chance at life?

But alas, that is not to be. Why bother with anything more complex when the simple sludge will suffice? Oh well.

I did mention it in the thread, and was pointed to an internet archive of all of SFDebris videos from 2010-2015. Mr Repzeon apparently still makes videos, but with a fraction of the viewers

Gotcha. I'll try to find it within this thread then. Post more if you can. Love to see em.

 

[Judge Dredd]

Popular literature has skewed ever more simplistic, juvenile, and therefore boring and unremarkable. The Young Adult genre is now completely misnamed, since the majority of people who enjoy it are over the age of 18. Western culture has become ever more infantilized and the YA genre, with its simplistic, feel-good stories and morals, appeals to the manchildren and womanchildren that are now so common in western countries.

I think you have it backwards. The YA genre is popular because "adult" books are all boring, drab, depressing exorcises in morally grey bullshit, or are filled with "current issues" that people get enough of in their real life. In the past, books for adults often included things like cowboys, horror, and pulp adventure. These days, those would be relegated to the YA section.

(As a side-note, I believe it is no coincidence that asian media is becoming bigger in the west in recent years, such as japanese games, anime, manga, vtubers, kpop, etc. The western mass media industrial complex is falling apart and people are trying to find alternatives.)

This is also why the culture war types are fighting tooth and nail to capture Japanese media, usually through "localization" that amounts to censorship and completely rewrites of the original work.

 

[Ferrari Lamborghini]

I think you have it backwards. The YA genre is popular because "adult" books are all boring, drab, depressing exorcises in morally grey bullshit, or are filled with "current issues" that people get enough of in their real life. In the past, books for adults often included things like cowboys, horror, and pulp adventure. These days, those would be relegated to the YA section.

I think we're both right in somewhat different ways and making different observations: YA novels, with their juvenile themes and simplistic stories, are a grade below even the genre fiction of the past that you mention.

Where books like the James Bond novels, Dirk Pitt, Sherlock Holmes and co. were more about pleasure than anything else, they seem like thought-provoking literature compared to what is today called "YA:" When they did have social commentary, it was far more nuanced and in the background compared to YA "classics" like "The Hate U Give" or "If I Was Your Girl." The ways they appealed to the audience were also far more effective, more thrilling, more artful (not to be confused with "pretentious") when compared to the average cookie-cutter YA plot of "flawless minority person has it bad, struggles a little against the irredeemable majority crowd, learns lessons about how evil the majority truly is, somewhat succeeds in the end."

Meanwhile, like you said, modern literature is basically the same, just even more joyless: the same blunt, mindless messaging that leaves no room for discussion or nuance and instead demands you agree or else have to consider yourself a bigot. Compare it to the literature of even the somewhat recent past though, and you can see how much literature demanded from an audience, how little it held the reader's hand and how much more absorbing and thought-provoking it was as a result.

In other words - it's all bad now, whether YA or supposedly serious "literature," since either way, you can be sure it is written by the same crowd of BAs with the same lack of life experience, uniformity of political views, and arrogance of wanting to tell you exactly what to think - and when people have the choice between the two, they choose the former, because it at least has some escapism mixed in with the demoralizing messaging.

They do still choose those works over the better-written genre fiction and more thought-provoking literature of the past, or else are incentivized to do so because of a lack of choice thanks to publishing houses today basically having set-in-stone rules to publish nothing else.

 

[Jason Wynn]

@Ferrari Lamborghini hit the nail on the head.

Of course there has always been genre fiction meant to be read at an adult level. The difference being in the quality and effort put into the prose and concepts behind the writing. There’s a world of difference between R.L Stine and Clive Barker, between J.K Rowling and Tolkien. Hell, even the trashy vampire books meant for an older crowd have so much more to offer than the ones meant for teenagers. I’d much rather read Ann Rice than P.C Cast or Stephanie Meyer.

YA books are meant to be a bridge from the extremely simplistic chapter books for very young children to more mature fare. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to read the literary equivalent of junk food every now and then, but there’s plenty of that out there meant for an older crowd that isn’t as sophomoric and dumbed down as books meant for 14 year olds where you can figure out the entire plot within the first 5 pages of the book and nothing at all is meant to be challenging or thought provoking in the slightest. If you’re in your 30s and 40s and the only thing you read is banal YA fiction, I’m gonna think you’re either stupid or autistic.

 

[Brabbit Narp]

@Ferrari Lamborghini hit the nail on the head.

Of course there has always been genre fiction meant to be read at an adult level. The difference being in the quality and effort put into the prose and concepts behind the writing. There’s a world of difference between R.L Stine and Clive Barker, between J.K Rowling and Tolkien. Hell, even the trashy vampire books meant for an older crowd have so much more to offer than the ones meant for teenagers. I’d much rather read Ann Rice than P.C Cast or Stephanie Meyer.

YA books are meant to be a bridge from the extremely simplistic chapter books for very young children to more mature fare. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to read the literary equivalent of junk food every now and then, but there’s plenty of that out there meant for an older crowd that isn’t as sophomoric and dumbed down as books meant for 14 year olds where you can figure out the entire plot within the first 5 pages of the book and nothing at all is meant to be challenging or thought provoking in the slightest. If you’re in your 30s and 40s and the only thing you read is banal YA fiction, I’m gonna think you’re either stupid or autistic.

Any recommendations in dead tree format then? Both of the more complex variety and those for just wanting to get their toes dipped to start off with.

For that matter, what sites and other locations do you use to research and purchase books for reading?

As far as my own reading is concerned, I have a few non-fiction books I have been reading through that have been good reads.

The first book I recommend is Enemy at the Gates, a generalized history for those that want to get their toes dipped into the Battle of Stalingrad and the events surrounding it. Whilst I cannot say it is the end all, be all in terms of definitive history for the subject, I can say it is a good point for starting off on to get some of the basics of the battle down before branching off out into other related books on the subject. I think I might be biased in the fact that at least one of the more "serious" YouTube historians in the form of TIKHistory (The same that has recently concluded a very long form video format covering the battle from start to finish as of a few months ago.) has recommended both it and a slew of other sources on the subject. Regardless of what you may think of him, it's always nice to find YouTubers that dive into such subjects managing to sort through the chaff to find the good stuff.

The second non fiction book of I recommend for WW2 would be a translated memoir from a Soviet artillerist by the name of Petr Mikhin, book title Guns Against the Reich. Whilst I would not say this it may be an entirely unbiased account from the war, his perspective as a man on the ground is quite the insightful one in detailing the struggles he had to go through with the hell of the Eastern Front. Holding the book in my hands, it's a good 200 pages, so you should be able to get through this in a day or more, depending on your reading speed.

Plus, the book is one of many in the Stackpole Military History Series. I have yet to read any of the other books in the series, but hopefully those others should prove to be of decent reads as well.

My third and final recommendation for the time being would be Japanese Destroyer Captain by a Tameichi Hara. I am still in the midst of reading this one on my smartphone, (Hell, I know, but I managed to snack this copy through other means.) but like with the prior recommendation, I find the book insightful of the struggle of the Japanese Navy with regards to combating both their adversaries and those little struggles with their own number. Obviously as with any memoirs, it has its own biases associated with it, and should not be used as a comprehensive detail of the entire Pacific theater. That said, it's been a good read thus far.

Thusly, ends my own recommendations. If anyone knows any appropriate thread to mirror this in, I'll repost it there.